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Asking how being 'international' relates to privilege, I analyse a role-play game, the Students' League of Nations, where pupils and teachers from select international schools simulate the UN General Assembly in Geneva. I document distinctive practices of selection and visions of excellence as talent, using Bourdieu's notion of 'institutional rite'. I combine insider ethnography and quantitative analyses of the host school with a historical account of its' elitism to bridge the gap between macro- and micro-analyses of 'everyday nationalism'. I show how this game draws a symbolic boundary between 'international' and 'local' high schools by separating students who are considered worthy of transgressing their national identity from all others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to bridge a divide between the empirical use of Bourdieu's concepts and the theoretical discussion of field theory with regard to education. I ask how a school can be 'international' where education is predominantly embedded in nation-states. First, I introduce field theory and its applications to globalization and education. Second, I analyze the International Baccalaureate Organization, a large non-profit provider of accreditation for schools, as a case for conceptualizing a global field of 'international education.' My ethnographic and historical findings provide the background for the global field argument. Second, drawing on IBO's student data, I construct a geometric space of IB schools and analyze it as a relatively autonomous subfield. Finally, I show how combining field analysis and geometric modeling yields a new perspective on 'international education.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]